Chinese semiconductor industry

european_guy said:

I've tried to translate somehow, can you please confirm winning bids this week are all from Chinese manufacturers and just few Japanese ones?

It seems to me Chinese local equipment manufacturers (at least for public tenders) are already well above 50% of market share...and very quickly moving to 60-70%

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They got about 70% (28 out of 40) in this bid. NAURA won 9 out of 40. One of the companies seemed to have only bought Chinese tools. The foreign tools are mostly Japanese, but there is also one from Israel. Nothing from the Dutch this time.

Which is why I suspect they might depend on Japanese tool makers more than the Dutch. Especially if they have already been stocking up good number of more recently DUVi scanners.

latenlazy said:

As I’ve been saying for a few years now, people shouldn’t expect aggressive schedules for process integration. That stuff takes a lot of time to get right. Once you have the equipment you can always try to fast track process integration and take a penalty in cost and efficiency, but if you don’t absolutely need to why take the penalties of doing something disruptive if taking your time is an option? (And yes, China taking its time *is* still an option because all these bans for the most part aren’t hurting present production nearly as much as future production. The equipment China already received doesn’t just disappear with bans).

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That would shock all the mega minds on twitter.

tphuang said:

They got about 70% (28 out of 40) in this bid. NAURA won 9 out of 40. One of the companies seemed to have only bought Chinese tools. The foreign tools are mostly Japanese, but there is also one from Israel. Nothing from the Dutch this time.

Which is why I suspect they might depend on Japanese tool makers more than the Dutch. Especially if they have already been stocking up good number of more recently DUVi scanners.


That would shock all the mega minds on twitter.

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Either they assume that sanctioned equipments would be remotely bricked or lacking access to update and maintenance would deteriorate the equipments.

Interesting to think that China with just 10% of the global foundry revenue share, represented 30% of the revenue of US Applied Materials, KLA, LAM Research and the rest of the semiconductor equipment sells in general. There is a lot of untapped potential there.

latenlazy said:

As I’ve been saying for a few years now, people shouldn’t expect aggressive schedules for process integration. That stuff takes a lot of time to get right. Once you have the equipment you can always try to fast track process integration and take a penalty in cost and efficiency, but if you don’t absolutely need to why take the penalties of doing something disruptive if taking your time is an option? (And yes, China taking its time *is* still an option because all these bans for the most part aren’t hurting present production nearly as much as future production. The equipment China already received doesn’t just disappear with bans).

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I agree, its just sometimes the expectations here can get a bit overly eager, and personally I am curious to see how the equipment rollout and integration goes given some of the aggressive localization implementation timelines that have been promoted.

tphuang said:

They got about 70% (28 out of 40) in this bid.

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Okay, I forget.

Was not there a rule of thumb that a company that is close to 70% of the market ... is close to being a monopoly?!

Well, if, having 70% of the market makes a company a monopoly, then 70% of this bid from domestic players, is pretty damn good.

Little wonder - China 2025, and they wanted that to be something like 70% self-sufficient.

The CCP does its homework. Unlike those Americans in power in the White House. Hehe.

european_guy said:

I've tried to translate somehow, can you please confirm winning bids this week are all from Chinese manufacturers and just few Japanese ones?

It seems to me Chinese local equipment manufacturers (at least for public tenders) are already well above 50% of market share...and very quickly moving to 60-70%

Click to expand...

Majority of winning bids are domestic one. Among foreign winning bids，majority are Japanese，plus one Israeli，one Taiwanese

Has this picture from U-Precision IPO document being uploaded here yet? this nm precision movement and measurement system is supposedly used for the DWSI according to the guy posting this. Looks like 4 were delivered in 2020 to 2021. Another 4 were delivered in 2022. They have started low rate production of this and will increase order with customer demand. If this is the case, then they built up to 4 production prototypes in 2022 for delivery to customers (maybe ICRD, SMEE, Huawei and Huahong?)

The more I read this kind of news the more I doubt that Holland will really ban DUV export to China.

The Netherlands is weighing whether to ban ASML from exporting some equipment to China, and the decision will be made within this month at the latest?

Alright, a little more on Huawei and the domestic chip. The insider that posted it (well at least he is known to have good info in the past) has already deleted that post. I'm sure that attracted more attention than he wanted.

In that same post's comment, he mentioned that 7nm chip will be available for Huawei by 2025. 7nm is basically SMIC's N+2 process and close to the earlier Samsung 5nm in performance IIRC. As such, a stacked SMIC 7nm chipset would be quite advanced. It would also indicate to me that SN2 production has been raised by then. I cannot imagine a scenario where smartphone CPU would be among the first items to be allocated capacity for SMIC's SN2 plant. That tells me we should be seeing N+2 production starting this year for chips to be released on the market by 2024. The initially chips imo will be server chips and maybe some desktop CPUs. Once they've mastered the production techniques, they'd be able to move to more advanced GPUs and smartphone chips by sometimes in 2024 or early 2025.

Now today, I saw a post where someone asked him about 12nm 5G chip again. In a rather shy response, he pointed to Huawei Enjoy 50z. From what I can see, it makes no mention of CPU and doesn't support 5G .
Unlike Huawei Enjoy 50 which is stated to use Kirin 700 series. There is nothing listed for 50z from what I can see.
That would suggest to me that a different version of this will come out in 2023 that will be stacked 12nm and support 5G. Again, I don't see anyone other than SMIC for this.

Huahai Qingke (Hwatsing), the company intends to use 213,004,400 yuan of surplus raised funds, 286,995,600 yuan of over-raised funds and 317,543,000 yuan of self-owned funds to invest in Huahai Qingke's integrated circuit high-end equipment research and development and industrialization project, with a total planned investment of 817,543,000 ​

The company's thinning products are expected to be shipped in small batches in 2023​

The company’s thinning products are expected to be shipped in small batches in 2023. Wet process equipment has been applied to the company’s wafer regeneration production. The company is actively developing customers and thinning products. The gross profit margin of wet equipment and wet equipment is close to the gross profit margin of the company's CMP equipment; the liquid supply system has been reflected in the company's 2022 revenue, and a small amount of measuring equipment has been shipped, and the current volume is small. It is expected that the liquid supply system and measurement The gross profit margin of equipment is lower than that of the company's CMP equipment.

Regarding the situation of parts and components, Huahai Qingke said that the company's current localization rate of machine parts is about 70% to 80%, and only a few general standard parts are imported from abroad, and they are not dedicated to semiconductors. Since 2018, the company has invested more energy in the independent research and development of core components and the cultivation of domestic component suppliers. The existing components will not be limited to American or Japanese suppliers.